March 25, 2020
TP count: 54.5
PT count: 13.5 (includes 6 jumbos)
Hi, slackers,
You might think you are a slacker, but have you had a half-written blogpost sitting in your Word file since Dec. 15? Have you been housebound for ten days and still not managed to get it completed? Even after my New Year’s resolution to write more blogs… Well, since I’m home with nothing better to do, and, obviously, you are, too, here goes…
I’m sitting here in my groutfit (that means I’m all in gray – sweatpants and top – get the picture? Don’t dwell on it too much…) not counting my calories or points or much of anything other than rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. Unlike you true slackers --er I mean "readers" - I do have on a full set of undergarments, real shoes, and I've showered. Can you say the same?
We are stocked up for life around here, although I must admit have already made a quite a dent in the chocolate and donut supplies. However, we have plenty of pot pies and canned apricots to see us through. Since re-acquiring our stay-at-home daughter for an indefinite visit, it’s hard to say who will prevail in the ever-increasing competition for the last of the chocolate-covered grahams or the caramel M & M’s. Oops, I slipped on that last one. No one but me knew there WERE caramel M & M’s in the house. I’m going to have to be more careful. Let’s just say, there are no current supplies of caramel M & M’s available to the general family. Heh heh.
You might wonder what I’ve been doing while under house arrest. Well, here’s a sampling:
Today I’ve had to track down everything I can find out on Prince Charles’s COVID-19 diagnosis. Did he call Harry? Does Harry feel terribly guilty about leaving his elderly father back in Olde England? Is William on high alert? Quite alarmed at reading of it this morning, I announced it to my husband who wasn’t sure which one Prince Charles is. No kidding. I told him he could never be in the royal watchers’ club my daughters and I share. He says he doesn’t care. He didn’t even know that Princess Anne and my sister share the same birth date. Exactly the same. What are the chances? Or that Meghan and Harry live in the same part of Canada my daughter-in-law’s brother, or that Meghan was a Kappa at Northwestern. Well, the list could go on. I told him he could at the very least watch The Crown. He wandered out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee.
I take regular walks around the area, usually while listening to a true crime podcast. Today a lovely slim dog ran into the street with no leash or apparent master. It’s a very distinctive breed, but as I am mostly illiterate of dogs, except for my dear granddog Frannie – I couldn’t tell you what it was. After a quick Google, I would say that it resembled a Pharaoh hound. Cars were slamming on their brakes from both directions. When I noticed the commotion, I changed my route and sneaked down a side road. I imagine that a dog lover or two tracked down its owner or at least reported it on the NextDoor app where the event will, no doubt, consume the rest of the day with impassioned comments about irresponsible dog owners. I’ll keep you posted.
I’ve partaken of the “old folks’ hour” at our local grocery store. Half of the battle is admitting that I AM one of the “old folks.” Do you have that problem, too? Anyway, the hardest part of going to the store nowadays avoiding the urge to hoard. How many eggs do I want, need, or could I possibly eat? But there aren’t many left…. But what are the chickens going to do? Stop laying them? They don’t know there’s a pandemic. But maybe the chicken owners will need to eat the chickens, in which case….Ok, yes, I need a Xanax or maybe some of the CBD gummies that my daughter keeps trying to foist on me.
My husband has taken to cleaning up the yard and every once in a while – always at the most inopportune time – perhaps I’ve just opened a bag of M & M’s (shhhh) or I’ve just sat down to watch Jeopardy or both – will request that I help him by “holding the bag” (yeah, that’s about right) while he inserts shovels full of sweet gum tree droppings, which, incidentally, look just like Coronavirus. My daughter told me that as she was “working at home” in my basement, she gleefully looked out to see me holding the bag in the rain. She was happy that she had escaped this duty and also the job of dragging said bags to the curb.
Our credit card had a fraudulent charge on it for $179.99. That and the phone calls that have resulted have provided many hours of confusion, speculation, outrage, trepidation, and dinner time conversation. How dare they suggest that we must have alternate emails or phone numbers? Today was the day for the final showdown with the offending company. I was prepared to do battle. However, when I checked my bill, the charge had been removed, and no one ever did tell me what had been charged and removed. I was kinda disappointed.
Now I’ll share my blogpost from December ….
Blogpost – December 15, 2019
Happy holidays, friends, fam, and frenemies,
You might be wondering why I am writing blog ten days before Christmas.
Empty nesters will agree that life changes as the years go by. The number of things to do and the urgency to do them subsides. Well, sort of.
Recent texts I’ve received:
“This sucks.” As well as a video of and actor saying, “I’ve made a huge mistake.” (From my daughter at Thanksgiving when her dad took her up on her offer to help him bag leaves.). She had forgotten, that when he bags leaves, he’s talking twelve bags, and he insists that every bag be filled with every last leaf it will hold.
“The older you become the more holidays become about keeping your father off a ladder.” From same daughter, but she did steal this one from The Reader’s Digest which I gave her to read on the plane. She had tried, without success, to prevent her father from getting up on a ladder and cleaning the gutters.
“Feel free to buy hats/gloves for both boys, too.” From daughter who has two little boys who I hope have hats and gloves for the next ten days until I get there for Christmas. One of them evidently doesn’t have a winter coat either. Well, it’s amazing what your children don’t mind waiting for until Grandma arrives.
A Few Tizhaps
Dinner at the U. Club
Last week we had a bit of a Tizhap. You remember those? When Tiz kind of messes up, although usually it’s not her fault. Anyway, we had plans to meet friends at the University Club at the Alumni Center to celebrate my birthday and my friend’s. She had made the reservation. Wednesday night my cohort and I put on our finest and headed to the club. I made my usual joke that we wouldn’t be the first ones there as there are always “elderly” (as in older than we are) couples waiting outside the door for the club to open at 5:00 pm– you know, white-haired guys in sports jackets and ladies with their purses on their laps. Well, I was wrong this time. The place was dark. The door was closed, and so was the club. Evidently, I had written it down wrong on my calendar. Just then, the manager, who had another event going on down the hall, walked by. He took one look at us and asked if we would like him to get us bottles of water. Did we look thirsty? Or maybe we looked like one of those elderly couples that I was talking about. We refused the water. Then he asked, “Well, is there anything I can do for you?” My husband’s reply, “Can you cook us dinner?” He declined. We were all dressed up with nowhere to go, so we walked across campus and ended up at Shakespeare’s Pizza, which has won awards for best pizza in a college town or some such prize. We were the best dressed couple there. And probably the oldest, too. We enjoyed and aptly named “Darwin” pizza. Luckily, we haven’t won the Darwin Award yet. We did make it to dinner the next night, as, after all, we are senior citizens, and my prime rib dinner is free during my birthday month.
Trip to Wal-Mart
During the Christmas rush, Wal-Mart had greeters who also were randomly checking receipts as you left the store. As the lines at the registers were long, I had reluctantly checked myself out. I suspect I was stopped because I had a few bottles of wine in the cart and hadn’t bothered to put them in bags. Maybe I had just run back and thrown some booze in the cart without paying? Anyway, the lady asked me how many 12 packs of paper towels I had purchased. I replied, “one.” She said, “Well, your receipt says that you purchased two packages.” I checked the receipt, and she was right. She sent me to customer service to get an $18 refund for the paper towels. Of course, I would have been furious if the cashier had made the mistake. No return lines are quite like Wal-marts. You can go in the store at midnight and there will be a line. Anyway, the line was long and there was only one person doing returns and refunds. After waiting ten minutes, I decided to solve my own problem. I walked back and got another large package of paper towels. The receipt checker applauded me for my ingenuity, and I found that I don’t need other people to rip me off. I’m perfectly capable of ripping off myself.
The Laundry Mystery
I probably shouldn’t tell this story. You might suspect that I am chewing on CBD gummies all the time. But it’s just too good to keep to myself. Maybe you have a similar tale you are ashamed to tell? When I go to my daughter’s, I do the laundry. Last time I was there, I was doing one last load of mostly kids’ clothes, including a bag of items from day care, before heading home. When I went to put the clothes in the dryer, I was annoyed to discover that a tissue had been left in a pocket. I couldn’t imagine how that had happened as kids don’t routinely carry tissues in their pockets. As I tried to pick off the lint, it seemed to be more like little plastic balls than paper. It was quite hard to pick it off. I took out my son-in-law’s golf shirts and hung them to dry; they didn’t seem to have attracted too much of the gunk. Then I got back to my task of picking off the weird lint on each piece of clothing. Wasn’t I surprised when I discovered that it wasn’t a tissue at all that had caused the problem. Are you ready for this? I had washed a whole load of laundry with a rolled up dirty (only # 1, folks, I’m not that out of it!) diaper. I considered hiding the evidence and putting the whole thing behind me, but it was too good of a story not to tell. And that’s how I’ve gotten myself in trouble all my life – by laughing and telling tales when I should just keep quiet.
Well, that’s all for now folks.
Grouting, counting, but not pouting,
and going nowhere fast,
I remain
Tizzie/Tiz/Tizmom/Mom/Liz/Elizabeth/Grandma/Grizzie
